Foremost among these must be placed that very outward prosperity which would seem at the first glance to augur for the Church a useful and prosperous career.  But that ‘which should have been for her wealth’ proved to her ‘an occasion of falling.’  The peace which she enjoyed made her careless and inactive.  The absence of the wholesome stimulus of competition was far from being an unmixed advantage to her.  Very soon after the accession of George I., when the voice of Convocation was hushed, a dead calm set in, so far as the internal affairs of the Church were concerned—­a calm which was really more perilous to her than the stormy weather in which she had long been sailing.  The discussion of great questions has always a tendency to call forth latent greatness of mind where any exists.  But after the second decade of the eighteenth century there was hardly any question within the Church to agitate men’s minds.  There was abundance of controversy with those without, but within all was still.  There was nothing to encourage self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice is essential to promote a healthy spiritual life.  The Church partook of the general sordidness of the age; it was an age of great material prosperity, but of moral and spiritual poverty, such as hardly finds a parallel in our history.  Mercenary motives were too predominant everywhere, in the Church as well as in the State.

The characteristic fault of the period was greatly intensified by the influence of one man.  The reigns of the first two Georges might not inaptly be termed the Walpolian period.  For though Walpole’s fall took place before the period closed, yet the principles he had inculcated and acted upon had taken too deep a root in the heart of the nation to fall with his fall.  Walpole had learned the wisdom of applying his favourite maxim, ‘Quieta non movere,’ to the affairs of the Church before he began to apply it to those of the State.  ‘In 1710,’ writes his biographer, ’Walpole was appointed one of the managers for the impeachment of Sacheverell, and principally conducted that business in the House of Commons.  The mischievous consequences of that trial had a permanent effect on the future conduct of Walpole when head of the Administration.  It infused into him an aversion and horror at any interposition in the affairs of the Church, and led him to assume occasionally a line of conduct which appeared to militate against those principles of toleration to which he was naturally inclined.’[649] And so his one idea of managing ecclesiastical affairs was to keep things quiet; he calmed down all opposition to the Church from without, but he conferred a very questionable benefit upon her by this policy.[650]